Scuibblenaughts Unlimited Review

By Bryan Travers

For those of you who don’t know the backstory of these games allow me to explain: Scuibblenaughts Unlimited is the third game in the Scuibblenaughts franchise. The first game; simply titled “Scuibblenaughts” gained a lot of hype when it was first announced because it allowed the player to write any noun in the English dictionary, and it would appear in game as an item. However, when it was released Scuibblenaughts received a lot of negative feedback due to its poor controls, bad puzzles and many other issues. The second game in the franchise: “Super Scuibblenaughts” set out to correct the many flaws of the first game, with better controls and the inclusion of adjectives. Unfortunately those were the only changes and just because the controls are better, doesn’t mean they’re good, movement was still clunky and all the problems from the last game were still present. This caused a lot of frustration because it had a full $40 price tag, but did nothing to evolve the franchise. Now we have Scuibblenaughts Unlimited, does it fix the problems plaguing the series, or is it just another update?

This game is just another update. Just like Super Scuibblenaughts before it, this game does absolutely nothing to advance the main concept, in fact the only difference between this game and Super Scuibblenaughts is that you can edit objects. That’s it! No effort was put into innovation; everything from the music, to even the level select screen is copy-pasted from the first game. Scuibblenaughts was released on the DS and Scuibblenaughts Unlimited is for the Wii U, 3DS and PC but the graphics quality is the same despite it being on far superior systems this time around. But the worst part off all this? This game is $40-$50 depending on the system. That’s a lot of money for a game that’s almost identical to the previous two.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they fixed the many problems the previous games had, but it doesn’t, the problems from the first game are still present in Unlimited. One of which is that the puzzles in this game are far too easy; a man is sad, give him a clown, a man is hungry, give him food, they aren’t so much actual puzzles as much as word association problems. You may be thinking that this is a game made for young kids, so I shouldn’t be complaining about the difficulty, but let me ask you this: if this game is made for kids, why does it accept words like: “Cthulhu”, “Satan” and “Dead Babies”? Another annoying thing is that almost every conversation in this game is spoken through small text bubbles, and reading them is extremely annoying and boring. Not only that but the controls are still terrible. Not only did Scuibblenaughts Unlimited barely add anything good, but it also failed to fix problems that shouldn’t have even existed in the first place.

The map is one of many things that haven’t changed.

This may sound strange but even though this game has some massive problems its still extremely fun. By far the best parts of this game are when you simply go off script and mess around with the game, which is extremely easy since despite there being thousands of items, many behave the same way. It doesn’t matter if it’s an angry dog or a demon, they will react the same in every situation. Like I said before: “a man is hungry, give him food” but since “food” is simply a category that things fall under you can give that man a “zombified, poisonous, explosive piece of bread” and you’ll be congratulated for it. Then there’s the moments where you set up your own scenarios, on completed levels you have free range to do whatever you want, so there’s nothing stopping you from fighting a robot ninja wielding a flaming chainsaw on top of an orphanage.

The possible scenarios are truly endless.

This game definitely has its moments of pointless, stupid fun, but this can also be achieved in any of he previous games. Scuibblenaughts Unlimited should have only been downloadable content worth $10 at most, but instead it’s a full priced game and a total rip-off. Do not buy this game at full price, either wait until it’s cheaper or just get the first game. In my opinion, this game is 3/10.